Preventable Diseases. Woods Hutchinson
nature's attempts to cure it.
This is admirably shown in our modern treatment of fevers. These we now know to be due to the infection of the body by more or less definitely recognized disease-germs or organisms. Fever is a complicated process, and we are still in the dark upon many points in regard to it, but we are coming more and more firmly to the conclusion that most of its symptoms are a part of, or at least incidents in, the fight of the body against the invading army. The flushed and reddened skin is due to the pumping of large quantities of blood through its mesh, in order that the poisons may be got rid of through the perspiration. The rapid pulse shows the vigor with which the heart is driving the blood around the body, to have its poisons neutralized in the liver, burned up in the lungs, poured out by the kidneys and the skin. The quickened breathing is the putting on of more blast in the lung poison-crematory. It is possible that even the rise of temperature has an injurious effect upon the invading germs or assists the body in their destruction.
In the past we have blindly fought all of these symptoms. We shut our patients up in stove-heated rooms with windows absolutely closed, for fear that they would "catch cold." We took off the sheets and piled blankets upon the bed, setting a special watch to see that the wretched sufferer did not kick them off. We discouraged the drinking of water and insisted on all drinks that were taken being hot or lukewarm. Nowadays all this is changed. We throw all the windows wide-open, and even put our patients out of doors to sleep in the open air, whether it be typhoid, tuberculosis, or pneumonia; knowing that not only they will not "catch cold," but that, as their hurried breathing indicates, they need all the oxygen they can possibly get, to burn up the poison poured out in the lungs and from the skin. We encourage the patient to drink all the cool, pure water he will take, sometimes gallons in a day, knowing that his thirst is an indication for flushing and flooding all the great systems of the body sewers. Instead of smothering him in blankets, we put him into cold packs, or put him to soak in cool water.
In short, we trust nature instead of defying her, coöperate with her in place of fighting her—and we have cut down the death-rate of most fevers fifty to seventy-five per cent already. Plenty of pure, cool water internally, externally, and eternally, rest, fresh air, and careful feeding, are the best febrifuges and antipyretics known to modern medicine. All others are frauds and simply smother a symptom without relieving its cause, with the exception of quinine in malaria, mercury, and the various antitoxins in their appropriate diseases, which act directly upon the invading organism.
Underneath all this storm and stress of the fever paroxysm, nature is quietly at work elaborating her antidote. In some marvelous fashion, which we do not even yet fully understand, the cells of the body are producing in ever-increasing quantities an anti-body, or antitoxin, which will unite with the toxin or poison produced by the hostile germs and render it entirely harmless. By a curious paradox of the process, it does not kill the germs themselves. It may not even stop their further multiplication. Indeed, it utilizes part of their products in the formation of the antitoxin; but it domesticates them, as it were—turns them from dangerous enemies into harmless guests.
The treaty between these germs and the body, however, is only of the "most-favored-nation" class; for let these tamed and harmless friends of the family escape and enter the body of another human being, and they will attack it as virulently as ever.
Now, where and how did nature ever succeed in getting the rehearsal and the practice necessary to build up such an extraordinary and complicated system of defense as this? Take your microscope and look at a drop of fluid from the mouth, the gums, the throat, the stomach, the bowels, and you will find it simply swarming with bacteria, bacilli, and cocci, each species of which numbers its billions. There are thirty-three species which inhabit the mouth and gums alone! We are literally alive with them; but most of them are absolutely harmless, and some of them probably slightly helpful in the processes of digestion. In fevers and infections the body merely applies to disease-germs the tricks which it has learned in domesticating these millions of harmless vegetable inhabitants.
Still more curious—there is a distinct parallel between the method in which food-materials are split up and prepared for assimilation by the body, and the method adopted in breaking up and neutralizing the toxins of disease-germs. It is now known that poisons are formed in the process of digesting and absorbing the simplest and most wholesome foods; and the liver uses the skill which it has gained in dealing with these "natural poisons" in disposing of the toxins of germs.
When a fever has run its course, as we now know nearly all infections do, within periods ranging from three or four days to as many weeks, it simply means that it has taken the liver and the other police-cells this length of time to handle the rioters and turn them into peaceable and law-abiding, even though not well-disposed citizens. In this process the forces of law and order can be materially helped by skillful and intelligent coöperation. But it takes brains to do it and avoid doing more harm than good. It requires far more intelligence on the part of the doctor, the nurse, or the mother, skillfully to help nature than it did blindly to fight her.
This is what doctors and nurses are trained for nowadays, and they are of use in the sick-room simply because they have devoted more time and money to the study of these complicated processes than you have. Don't imagine that calling in the doctor is going to interfere with the natural course of the disease, or rob the patient of some chance he might have had of recovering by himself. On the contrary, it will simply give nature and the constitution of the patient a better chance in the struggle, probably shorten it, and certainly make it less painful and distressing.
If these symptoms of the summer fevers and fluxes are indicative of nature's attempts to cure, those of the winter's coughs and colds are no less clearly so. As we walk down the streets, we see staring at us in large letters from a billboard, "Stop that Cough! It is Killing you!" Yet few things could be more obvious to even the feeblest intelligence, than that this "killing" cough is simply an attempt on the part of the body to expel and get rid of irritating materials in the upper air-passages. As long as your larynx and windpipe are inflamed or tickled by disease-germs or other poisons, your body will do its best to get rid of them by coughing, or, if they swarm on the mucous membrane of the nose, by sneezing. To attempt to stop either coughing or sneezing without removing the cause is as irrational as putting out a switch-light without closing the switch. Though this, like other remedial processes, may go to extremes and interfere with sleep, or upset the stomach, within reasonable limits one of the best things to do when you have a cold is to cough. When patients with severe inflammations of the lungs become too weak or too deeply narcotized to cough, then attacks of suffocation from the accumulation of mucus in the air-tubes are likely to occur at any time. Young children who cannot cough properly, not having got the mechanism properly organized as yet, have much greater difficulty in keeping their bronchial tubes clear in bronchitis or pneumonia than have grown-ups. Most colds are infectious, like the fevers, and like them run their course, after which the cough will subside along with the rest of the symptoms. But simply stopping the cough won't hasten the recovery. Most popular "Cough-Cures" benumb the upper throat and stop the tickling; smother the symptoms without touching the cause. Many contain opium and thus load the system with two poisons instead of one.
Lastly, in the realm of the nervous system, take that commonest of all ills that afflict humanity—headache. Surely, this is not a curative symptom or a blessing in disguise, or, if so, it is exceedingly well disguised. And yet it unquestionably has a preventive purpose and meaning. Pain, wherever found, is nature's abrupt command, "Halt!" her imperative order to stop. When you have obeyed that command, you have taken the most important single step towards the cure. A headache always means something—overwork, under-ventilation, eye-strain, underfeeding, infection. Some error is being committed, some bad physical habit is being dropped into. There are a dozen different remedies that will stop the pain, from opium and chloroform down to the coal-tar remedies (phenacetin, acetanilid, etc.) and the bromides. But not one of them "cures," in the sense of doing anything toward removing the cause. In fact, on the contrary they make the situation worse by enabling the sufferer to keep right on repeating the bad habit, deprived of nature's warning of the harm that he is doing to himself. As the penalties of this continued law-breaking pile up, he requires larger and larger doses of the deadening drug, until finally he collapses, poisoned either by his own fatigue-products or by